Pullman Strike Trial

Mock Trial: The Pullman Strike Christopher Martell, Ed.D. George Mortimer Pullman was an influential locomotive industrialist of the 19th century and the founder of the Pullman Palace Car Company. His innovations brought comfort and luxury to railroad travels in the 1800ʼs with the introduction of sleeping cars, dining cars, and parlor cars. Like other industrialists of the period Pullman built a company town in Illinois near his factory to accommodate his workersʼ housing needs (it was named Pullman, Illinois after the company), which was annexed to the city of Chicago in 1889. He advertised it as a model community, which offered his workers modern amenities in a beautiful setting. By 1890, the Pullman Palace Car Company was operating 2,135 railroad cars on approximately 160,000 miles of track in the United States with a work force of 12,367 employees. In 1893, a major economic depression hit the United States and this affected the railroad business. Matters grew worse when the Pullman Company closed its Detroit shops, employing about 800, and concentrated its contract and repair business at Pullman, Illinois. The company and the railroads had a surplus of cars, hence pending orders were canceled and car building stopped. The Pullman Company also cut wages of their employees by on average 25 percent. At the same time, the employees of the company argued it was unfair that they had to live in Pullman, Illinois, where the rents were 20-25 percent more than living in Chicago (and the rent was paid to their employer the Pullman Company). Due to the cut in wages and high rents, on the evening of May 10, 1894 the local locomotive unions met and voted to strike at once. As soon as the strike was declared the company laid off hundreds of employees and closed its shops. During this period the Civic Federation of Chicago, composed of powerful and wealthy citizens, called upon the company twice to urge reconciliation and arbitration between the Pullman Company and the unions. The Pullman Company responded by saying there was nothing to reconcile, the unions were wrong. The Civic Federation suggested the Pullman Company consider negotiating with unions about rents as well as wages. The Pullman Company argued that rent is not something that the unions could negotiate, if the employees did not like the rent they could move elsewhere and that the wages were fair. In June of 1894, the Pullman Company declined to receive any further communication from the American Railway Union. As a result of this, the union launched a boycott. Within four days, 125,000 workers on twenty-nine railroads had quit work rather than handle Pullman cars. Adding fuel to the fire the railroad companies began hiring replacement workers (that is, strikebreakers or “scabs”), which only increased hostilities. On June 29, 1894, Eugene V. Debs, head of the American Railway Union, hosted a peaceful gathering to obtain support for the strike from fellow railroad workers at Blue Island, Illinois. Afterward groups within the crowd became enraged and set fire to nearby buildings and derailed a locomotive. Elsewhere in the United States, sympathy strikers prevented transportation of goods by walking off the job, obstructing railroad tracks or threatening and attacking 2 strikebreakers. This increased national attention to the matter and fueled the demand for federal action. As a result, the federal courts demanded that the strikers cease their activities or face being fired. Debs and other leaders of the union ignored the injunction, and federal troops were called into action. Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois had been hesitant to employ the Illinois National Guard to put down the strike instead relying on the local authorities to handle the situation. However, he said he would use the National Guard to protect property and did not want federal troops to intervene. However, using the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, which was created to stop company monopolies, President Grover Cleveland demanded the American Railway Union stop the strike. The strike was broken up by United States Marshals and some 12,000 federal soldiers, sent in by President Cleveland on the premise that the strike interfered with the delivery of U.S. Mail, ignored a federal injunction and represented a threat to public safety. The arrival of the military and subsequent deaths of workers led to further outbreaks of violence. During the course of the strike, 13 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded. The local police arrested 515 people. An estimated 6,000 rail workers committed $340,000 in property damage. Many of the strike leaders, including Debs, were arrested and put in jail for numerous crimes including stopping the delivery of the U.S. Mail. Trial Participants: George Pullman (company owner) Frank Glover (against strikers) Chicago Tribune Reporter (against strikers) Eugene Debs (union leader and striker) William Smith (striker) Jennie Curtis (striker) Lawyers for the Pullman Company Lawyers for the Strikers of the American Railway Union Judge Jury Document 1: Strikers Denounce Pullman (Statement from the Strikers – including William Smith) Mr. President and Brothers of the American Railway Union: We struck at Pullman because we were without hope. We joined the American Railway Union because it gave us a glimmer of hope. Twenty thousand souls, men, women, and little ones, have their eyes turned toward this convention today, straining eagerly through dark despondency for a glimmer of the heaven-sent message you alone can give us on this earth. In stating to this body our grievances it is hard to tell where to begin. You all must know that the proximate cause of our strike was the discharge of two members of our grievance committee the day after George M. Pullman, himself, and Thomas H. Wickes, his second vice- president, had guaranteed them absolute immunity. The more remote causes are still imminent. Five reductions in wages, in work, and in conditions of employment swept through the shops at Pullman between May and December, 1893 The last was the most severe, amounting to nearly 30 percent, and our rents had not fallen. We owed Pullman $70,000 when we struck May 11. We owe him twice as much today. He does not evict us for two reasons: One, the force of popular sentiment and public opinion; the other because he hopes to starve us out, to break through in the back of the American Railway Union, and to deduct from our miserable wages when we are forced to return to him the last dollar we owe him for the occupancy of his houses… When we went to tell him our grievances he said we were all his “children.” Pullman, both the man and the town, is an ulcer on the body politic. He owns the houses, the schoolhouses, and churches of God in the town he gave his once humble name. The revenue he derives from these, the wages he pays out with one hand—the Pullman Palace Car Company, he takes back with the other—the Pullman Land Association. He is able by this to bid under any contract car shop in this 3 country. His competitors in business, to meet this, must reduce the wages of their men. This gives him the excuse to reduce ours to conform to the market. His business rivals must in turn scale down; so must he. And thus the merry war—the dance of skeletons bathed in human tears—goes on, and it will go on, brothers, forever, unless you, the American Railway Union, stop it; end it; crush it out. Our town is beautiful. In all these thirteen years no word of scandal has arisen against one of our women, young or old. What city of 20,000 persons can show the like? Since our strike, the arrests, which used to average four or five a day, has dwindled down to less than one a week. We are peaceable; we are orderly, and but for the kindly beneficence of kindly-hearted people in and about Chicago we would be starving. We are not desperate today, because we are not hungry, and our wives and children are not begging for bread. But George M. Pullman, who ran away from the public opinion that has arisen against him, like the genie from the bottle in the Arabian Nights, is not feeding us. He is patiently seated beside his millions waiting for what? To see us starve. We have grown better acquainted with the American Railway Union these convention days, and as we have heard sentiments of the noblest philanthropy fall from the lips of our general officers—your officers and ours—we have learned that there is a balm for all our troubles, and that the box containing it is in your hands today only awaiting opening to disseminate its sweet savor of hope George M. Pullman, you know, has cut our wages from 30 to 70 percent. George M. Pullman has caused to be paid in the last year the regular quarterly dividend of 2 percent on his stock and an extra slice of 1 1/2 percent, making 9 1/2 percent on $30,000,000 of capital. George M. Pullman, you know, took three contracts on which he lost less than $5,000. Because he loved us? No. Because it was cheaper to lose a little money in his freight car and his coach shops than to let his workingmen go, but that petty loss, more than made up by us from money we needed to clothe our wives and little ones, was his excuse for effecting a gigantic reduction of wages in every department of his great works, of cutting men and boys and girls; with equal zeal, including everyone in the repair shops of the Pullman Palace cars on which such preposterous profits have been made… We will make you proud of us, brothers, if you will give us the hand we need.

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